Maybe I'm old,maybe I've been punched in the head too many times but the whole bitcoin thing doesn't really make sense to me.

Bitcoins are "gathered" by me doing nothing other than leaving my computer on and letting it run some free software??

..and all that software does,in conjunction with other computers running the same kind of software, is solve an equation??

...and when that equation is solved we get given some bitcoins (or portions of bitcoins) which we can then exchange for real world stuff??

...all while i was eating a cheese sammich and playin X box??

As far as I'm aware, that's just how the currency is generated. The real beauty of this is that it allows for low-cost transfer and storage of funds between different currencies, etc., and it's money that can't be screwed with by anyone who's not you or the guys running the program. So no banks, no oversight, just you, your money, and your subsequently ever-growing supply of black market Twinkies. ...Or whatever the hell people spend their free money on currently.

If it's an unknown "Satoshi", he could easily choose to change the market as he pleases by rewriting part of the program (or using a developers console) to make himself infinitely rich. Of course in practicality, he'd probably give a few thousand here, take a few hundred there...

And once no one cares for bitcoins, they're worthless. Now I'd understand if this was government sponsored (heck, even private would work) with some form of security, but as it stands, you can lose all your bitcoins on a server/cloud crash or hack. Or an abusive admin.

If it's an unknown "Satoshi", he could easily choose to change the market as he pleases by rewriting part of the program (or using a developers console) to make himself infinitely rich. Of course in practicality, he'd probably give a few thousand here, take a few hundred there...

And once no one cares for bitcoins, they're worthless. Now I'd understand if this was government sponsored (heck, even private would work) with some form of security, but as it stands, you can lose all your bitcoins on a server/cloud crash or hack. Or an abusive admin.

The Bitcoin website actually has quite a bit to say about securing your funds and about the caveats and dangers involved - have you read through it at all?

I tried fucking around with this "deepweb" faggotry, where the bitcoins seem to be most prominent, for a while. I saw ads for drugs, hacking services, prostitution, and motherfucking assassinations. Now, I'm all for this libertarians wet dream of a currency, but could the fact that it's facilitating this kind of **** give the FBI or some such organization the right to take down the whole system?

The limit on the number of bitcoins is an ideological sop toward "sound money" libertarians, though of course any virtual currency isn't going to be pegged to some material item, like gold. One could potentially argue that bitcoins are tied to processing poweróthus the "mining" metaphoróbut processing power doubles every eighteen months, so unless bitcoins become harder to mine, it's a non-starter as a "sound money."

The limit on bitcoins isn't necessarily a big deal since bitcoins can't be generalized. The chances of you buying an orange with it at the corner store are very slimóit's just high-tech nerd to high-tech nerd transfers. Really, the only thing that the bitcoin limit means is that when all the bitcoins have been mined, either Satoshi or someone else will found another virtual currency, perhaps ByteBucks, and offer to sell people ByteBucks for the low cost of ten bitcoins, and perhaps by then there will be ByteBuck-generation apps that can be more easily generalized among people who own smartphones or tablets.